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  • CiviCRM Community Forums (archive) »
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  • Using CiviMail (Moderator: Piotr Szotkowski) »
  • CIVI MAIL Vs Send Email to Contacts Action
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Author Topic: CIVI MAIL Vs Send Email to Contacts Action  (Read 2811 times)

Sarah

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CIVI MAIL Vs Send Email to Contacts Action
May 17, 2007, 05:00:40 pm
How many emails can you include when you use the Send Email to Contacts Action? What is the difference between CIVI MAIL and this action?  Is there a protocol for when you should use one and when you should use the other?

Donald Lobo

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Re: CIVI MAIL Vs Send Email to Contacts Action
May 17, 2007, 05:50:22 pm

sarah:

There is no limit on the Send Email to Contacts Action.

however that action is processed by the browser on a web server and could potentially take a long time and could timeout based on your web server config and/or run out of memory. So in general you should not do it for large numbers of contacts (> 10/20?). Also we dont record if the mail bounced or was returned or failed.

CiviMail processes the mail via a cron job and also processes incoming mail and records stats. We can (and will at some stage) scale this up by running multiple cron jobs from multiple machines and make things more efficient and faster delivery. So for high volume delivery, CiviMail is the preferred option. However setting it up is not for the faint hearted and requires a fecent amount of resources

lobo

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GregoryHeller

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Re: CIVI MAIL Vs Send Email to Contacts Action
June 08, 2007, 11:39:01 am
I would add that using "send to contacts" does not give you the click through tracking, or open rate tracking and leaves no option for the user to unsubscribe.

The rule of thumb that i use is this:
Use "send email to contacts" for up to 50 or 75 contacts that are well known to me, as in, they will not get pissed off that I am emailing them.  I would not email 75 users with whom i have no real relationship.  So to put it another way: i might use send to contacts to email content contributors, or board members, but not donors or members.


As Lobo says, civimail is not a cakewalk to install (on your server) but that is no excuse for "abusing" the send to contacts functionality.  If you need mailing list functionality, I highly recommend getting civimail properly set up, or using a 3rd party mailing service and doing exports from civicrm to that service.  A service will maintain an unsub list (if it is good) and thus you will; not find yourself having to manually manage a list of people who do not want to hear from you.
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  • CiviCRM Community Forums (archive) »
  • Old sections (read-only, deprecated) »
  • Support »
  • Using CiviCRM »
  • Using CiviMail (Moderator: Piotr Szotkowski) »
  • CIVI MAIL Vs Send Email to Contacts Action

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